Social networking for charities

Reported this Christmas for the first time over 10% of people online were visiting social networking websites in the week ending 27th December.

The largest of these, Facebook, accounted for 1 out of every 22 visitors on the web during Christmas week.

And given that Facebook have announced that their membership rose 50m to 150m in just 4 months (that's 150m active users, almost half of which visit the website every day), why aren't more charities using these websites? Even small charities who don't have their own website can use social networking sites to promote themselves; in fact they should be more active than those who do have their own sites.

Research released by Johnathon Waddington states that only 5% of charities think they are doing as much as they can to fundraise online. 48% of charities say they do not have an online fundraising plan at all.

Everyclick provides a fundraising widget and a 'donate now' button for users and charities to download and add to their pages on these sites - have a look (examples):

Widget
Donate now button

Twitter is the latest networking tool - it's very simple to use, and very much the 'in' thing. So get tweeting if you want to be seen.

Forums are also useful, as long as they have plenty of members. Post to forums on the subject of your charity eg. pet forums for animal charities, mum's forums for children's charities, local forums for charities which work in the local community etc. to find people who have a keen interest in the things you are trying to help.

For a small charity with no website, you can use your charity information page on Everyclick to tell fundraisers more about your charity, upload more details, add an image to the homepage so that all your fundraisers will see, add regular news items to your charity's page and even sell eGifts through the website. Everyclick allows fundraisers to set up fundraising pages in support of your charity and to make donations (including the ability to Gift Aid it) through the site. Over 200,000 charities are already on the site; if your charity is registered in the UK and not already there when you search, you can add it.

Another useful blog post: Beth's Blog



Source: givinginadigitalworld
givinginadigitalworld